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FreeDOS Not Dead; 1.0 Release Imminent
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Jul 03, 2006 06:17 PM
from the wide-wide-world-of-os-hacking dept.
from the wide-wide-world-of-os-hacking dept.
Lisa writes "Jim Hall, creator of the open source MS-DOS operating system project FreeDOS, says that while work on the project may have slowed recently, he isn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. In fact, Hall says he hopes to see version 1.0 released as soon as the end of the month." (So rumors to the contrary can be safely ignored.)
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FreeDOS 1.0 Released 365 comments
Noksagt writes, "FreeDOS 1.0 has been released only a little bit later than planned. The 1.0 milestone is considered to be 'a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement' and features long filename support, HIMEM and EMM386 management, and CD-ROM support."
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Good to hear this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good to hear this (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget... (Score:5, Informative)
It's an excellent DOS emulator for Windows, Linux, MacOSX, BeOs, FreeBSD, OS/2 and toasters... Wait, it might not run on toasters. You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.
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Re:Don't forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good old Dosemu works pretty well for me, especially on a Pentium III @ 750 MHz. I've heard DOSBox requires several GHz to acceptably emulate a 486DX2 @ 66 MHz. Dosemu does not emulate the CPU, so it is an order of magnitude faster.
Dosemu used to be hard to configure and used to require root privileges and direct acces to the hardware; recent versions have pretty much gotten rid of those problems. I run most of my games with xdosemu in a regular window, I can easily switch to full screen if I prefer, I get very nice MIDI thanks to ALSA + Sound Blaster Live, etc. Of course the experience depends on the games, some of them had funky ways to address the hardware, there are a few cases where Dosemu doesn't cope that well (jerky mouse in a few games). But I can play Day of the Tentacle, Duke Nukem 3D, Dungeon Master, Lands of Lore, Arkanoid, Ecstatica, the Elder Scrolls: Arena just fine, and that's just those I tried this past week-end.
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Re:Don't forget... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. It doesn't work.
2. Have you ever, you know.. used Linux? It could be my memory playing tricks, but I can't for the life of me recall the "Run in Compatibility Mode" to run my DOS games in Linux.
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Re:Good to hear this (Score:5, Interesting)
FreeDOS still has a bright future in several niches. There is still a need for a 16-bit, real-mode operating system in a number of embedded situations.
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how's about Free95? (Score:5, Funny)
Why? (Score:3)
(Oh, and also because FreeDOS running in a VM plays some wierd DOS games very well.)
I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:4, Informative)
It's just not possible to have a universal NIC driver. Videocards all impliment SVGA and VESA compatibility, but networks cards don't have any similar universal standard.
Still, probably a handful of different NIC drivers will handle 95% of ethernet cards you'll come across. Tulip, NE2000, RTL8139, SIS900, 3C905, etc.
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Re:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:4, Insightful)
There are lots of older PCs that don't have a working CD and tons more that don't have usb ports, or don't have a bios capable of booting from USB.
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It's effectively dead... (Score:5, Informative)
MANY, MANY years into the project now, and yet compatibility with MS-DOS is in a rather sad state, the partitioning/formating programs create corrupt partitions that MS-DOS/Windows will choke on after a little bit or writing to. Many of the programs (Defrag?) still can't even handle FAT32, even though FAT32 has been around forever, and is largely obsolete now. What are the chances of FreeDOS 2.0 adding NTFS support?!
DR-DOS is still freely available, and a much better choice for boot floppies/CDs, as well as running old DOS programs (something like xmess will probably include 100% DOS compatibility before FreeDOS does).
DOS is too old and simple to be of any use in embedded apps as well. Projects like ELKS and ucLinux are far better options. It might be usable by companies' boot disks, but the limited compatibility might make licensing one of the many commercial DOS implimentations a cheaper and more reliable option.
The project is a zombie. It can continue walking on, but it's still long since dead, whether it knows it or not.
Re:It's effectively dead... (Score:4, Insightful)
You completely missed the point. It's not about what DOS has done in the past, it's about what it needs to do to become a useful and viable OS in the near future.
FreeDOS isn't some retro-programming experiment, trying to make old games work on old hardware. It's niche has been for Windows boot disks, and for use in dual-booting. But with 2000 and XP defaulting to NTFS, you'll see FreeDOS no longer working properly for either job, just as older OSes with only FAT16 support have gone away as well.
In the next few years, as Microsoft gets a clue, and it becomes easier for average people to create WinPE/BartsPE boot discs, DOS will become a distant memory... Just as distant as CP/M is now.
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Freedos writes OS2 Warp floppy disks (Score:5, Interesting)
Very usefull for flashing a BIOS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Maybe I'm missing something... (Score:5, Informative)
I have used FreeDOS to run several programs, and it is useable for many tasks, although it still does have some way to go before it is a perfect imitation. Nevertheless, I am glad to see it is still progressing, since I do think there is a use for this kind of thing.
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Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I, for one, wait with baited breath for FreeDOS 1.0, and Duke Nuke'em: Forever... which will be out "when it's done." (Read: Any day now.)
Anybody who says waiting for vaporware is like watching grass grow is just crying over spilled milk the cow jumped over the moon the queen of heart of the problem child.
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Freedos rocks. Tcp/ip stack and all the goodies to make imaging machines from a network image repository with ghost of other dos based imaging apps a real treat/breeze.
universities love freedos, researchers do as freedos works on old Pc104 386 based boards for space based or rugged terrain data collection on hardware that the only collection app is an old dos one that will not run under linux. most machine shops love freedos as it's the only way to keep those old machines that use dos running instead of buying new CNC hardware and software for tens of thousands of dollars when the old machine works just fine.
I can go on for hours if you really want me to list everyone who cares about FreeDos....
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Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, FreeDOS. Sorry, my mistake.
*ahem* (Score:5, Interesting)
If you'd bothered to even glimpse at the FreeDOS web page, you'd see that the first priority of FreeDOS is and always has been to maintain a lightweight, completely DOS compatible OS. FreeDOS-32 is a completely different project. Any multitasking extensions (think DR-DOS in its latter days), GUIs (FreeGEM, notably, among others), etc... have always been planned after and as an adjunct to FreeDOS, not to replace it. There's still plenty of life left in DOS and the DOS environment. I for one would love to see a high-performance, single-user OS optimized for modern hardware without the cruft of the NT based MS OSs OR Linux.
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Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:5, Informative)
If you have an 8-bit NIC, sure... If not, the TCP/IP stack won't do you any good, and you just need the old SLIP/PPP programs for DOS.
SSHv1, Telnet, FTP, etc. There's even BOBCAT for a lynx-like browser, except that it's somewhat painful on an XT, and crashes after every ~20 pages you visit (out of memory).
It was only a couple years ago I still had an old 286 up and working this way. Not for any good reasons, mind you, just for the hell of it.
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I care, sort of. (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me be the first to answer... (Score:4, Informative)
DOS still has a large user base out there, espcially in the embedded and machine controller markets. So yes, people care.
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